Quotes About Art

Only poetry isn't shit.

With every day that passes I am more convinced that the act of writing is a concious act of humility.

Leopard is an animal design, and my designs come from nature.

Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.

Being in the moment of creating produces a meditative space where you can just lose yourself.

Art needs to be imaginatively undressed in order to be appreciated, and so does the world.

Mathematics, after all, lives on unambiguous exactitude, whereas there are types of art that die of it.

The blending in people's minds of art, status and virtue is an extension of Bell's principle of sartorial morality: people find dignity in the signs of an honourably futile existence removed from all menial necessities.

Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?

When it finds you (whatever we call "it"—the Muse, inspiration, Story), writing moves past the careful construction of a plot line and the adding-in of needed characters. Story overflows outline and cuts its own passage through the valley of fiction. For the writer, it's an immersion.

We dream of carving dragons

THE IMAGE OF Christ crucified is so ubiquitous in Christian art that it seems impossible that it was not there from the first. Yet, art historians have been unable to identify an unambiguously Christian crucifix before the fourth or early fifth century, and only a few examples before the sixth century. Though crosses and episodes from the events of Christ's Passion began to appear on Christian artifacts by the mid-fourth century, none ever depicted Christ on the cross.

A film's success or failure is strictly on the director's shoulders.

If Michelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been wallpapered.

Fundamentalists are to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.

That September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity; its wisdom is that the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other. Science and art, matter and spirit, indigenous knowledge and Western science—can they be goldenrod and asters for each other? When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response.

Time can vanish in exploring these places, like wandering through an art gallery of unexpected forms and colors. Sometimes, I look up from my microscope at the end of an hour, and I'm taken aback at the plainness of the ordinary world, the drab and predictable shapes.

A printmaker I know showed me that if you stare for a long time at a block of yellow and then shift your gaze to a white sheet of paper, you will see it, for a moment, as violet. This phenomenon—the colored afterimage— occurs because there is energetic reciprocity between purple and yellow pigments, which goldenrod and asters knew well before we did.

One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence.

This was an exercise in personal forestry. But it was also an exercise in the creation of personal art. I could have been painting a landscape or composing a cycle of songs.

It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?

What are you doing here?" All right, he was standing in front of an easel, holding a paint palette and brush. "Taxidermy?" he responded with just a touch of his own sarcasm.